Monday, September 17, 2012

Yours truly attended the Parapsychological
Conference in Leiden, on 15 September 2012, organized by Prof. Hans Gerding and
his colleagues at the Parapsychologisch
Instituut of the Netherlands.

Prof. David Lukoff spoke of the understanding
of religion and spirituality by psychologists and psychiatrists in their bible,
the DSM-4 and -5. After an introduction to his youthful experiences as a
hippie, when he took LSD and briefly saw himself as a religious prophet, the
professor came to the point. It took a long time, but now the mental-healthcare
professionals are increasingly taking religious/spirituality seriously.
Especially military psychologists use the DSM category of religious or
spiritual problem in their diagnosis. Many people think that their mental
disorders are the result of sins they have committed. Conversion of oneself or
on a family member is another frequent cause of mental problems.

This is by no means self-evident. Because of
their training, clinicians are programmed to be wary of this. From the 1930
till the 1970s, psychologists used the term “catatonia” frequently when
describing meditation. Indeed, meditators are inward-looking and therefore
insensitive to outside stimuli, a feature they share with catatonia patients.
But meditators choose to turn inwards, while catatonic patients have no choice
in the matter, their behavior is compulsive. Today, this crucial distinction
between normal and sick human beings is widely recognized. Indeed, psychologists
now devote serious research to near-death and mystical experiences.

Prof. Liane Hofmann of the Institute for
Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, spoke of
the relevance of religion and spirituality to psychotherapy. She had a high
focus on the therapeutic context, and typically she started out by asking the
psychotherapists among the audience to identify themselves. There were many.

What struck me is the conventionality of the
goals set by therapists, the total absence of the need and search for
enlightenment (or its religious equivalent, salvation). The theologian Hans
Küng once said it during an invited speech before the American Psychiatric
Association: religion is absent in psychotherapy, it is the big taboo of the profession.
Even our professor only spoke of religion and spirituality, but never of their
natural goals. These are still treated by psychologists as private pet issues,
not taken seriously. Nevertheless, from her European angle, she confirmed what
the American professor had observed: that psychotherapists increasingly value
religion and spirituality and are gaining expertise in this field. But it
should be noted that, while this time she spoke before a friendly audience, she
clearly was used toskeptical or hostile audiences, which is why she took cover
behind otherwise unnecessary statistics and investigation reports.

Prof. Hein van Dongen from the host university
spoke of “energy”. It has a vague meaning, like Chinese “qi”, for an atmosphere
is a room or a circle of people, but otherwise we use it in its literal
meaning. Aristotle already used it, Paul used it for God’s working, and there
is already a difference, for to Aristotle, energy was inherent in things,
whereas to Saint Paul, it was inherent in one Supreme Being. Paul influenced
the use of the term in a religious sense till the 18th century. It
also meant “spiritual force”. Poets used it for landscapes, which also have an
energy, and its organ was called “imagination”. According to William Blake, reason
is sublimated energy, while pure energy is vitality emanating from the body,
including eroticism. He also mentioned Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, to whom qi
also the basis of an esthetic (call it “energy stream”) and the Dutch
Sinologist Bourel who said some hundred years ago that the origin of all qi is
the sun.

Prof. A. van der Braak (from the Calvinist Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) read a paper
on the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and the Zen master Dōgen. It is now common to give a Zen interpretation of Meister Eckhart.
Schopenhauer already used Eckhart to understand Zen. Daisetz Suzuki introduced
Zen to Westerners beginning with Eckhart. His interpretation follows the common
one: a rebellious mystic who goes
against established religion. Suzuki only sees differences between Christianity
and Buddhism as a waste of time. The rebellious and mystical image of Zen was
counterfeited in Tang China and sold to the West by 20th century
Japanese scholars.

“There is nothing mystical about Zen.” Here I
am not sure the speaker was quoting someone or speaking for himself. I do know,
however, that this viewpoint of denying a mystical dimension to Zen is quite
popular among Christian missionaries. They may even be right, depending on how
“mysticism” is defined. If mysticism is defined theistically, then of course,
Zen is not mystical while Christian mysticism is. But in speaking of “mysticism”,
most people think of meditation, emptying the mind, and in that sense Zen is
mystical par excellence. Anyway, the speaker explained himself: “Zen is a body
practice, to embody the Buddha nature, not to understand it.“ Oh, well. But I
agree with him when he laughs at the New Age simpletons who say: “Zen’s emptiness
= Eckhart’s nothingness.”

Meister Eckhart wrote his mystical works in
German, his serious works in Latin. Eckhart writing in Latin was just a
scholastic philosopher. Both Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer say: our
understanding of a text is based on our pre-understanding, it determines what
we notice (or not) in a thinker. Givenness is never neutral or objective. Thus,
the reading of Eckhart as an anti-Church mystic is determined by some people’s
Romantic premises. Objectivity should be pursued, but we should remain aware of
our pre-understanding and explicitate it. For Eckhart, mysticism is always tied
to reading the Bible. He believed in Biblical revelation.

Dōgen Zenji was the founder of the
Soto tradition of Zen (as opposed to Rinzai, from Lin Ji). Zen here is not
about a mystical transcendent experience, but about permanently realizing the
Buddha nature. Dogen: “Buddhism s to study the self. Studying the self is to
forget the self …” Could Eckhart have said that?

Conclusion: rather than saying that mystics
meet one another and transcend their own tradition, their going deeper in their
own tradition seems more like it. Maybe it is time for a second wave of Zen to
the west. Eckhart and Dōgen entered their own tradition more
profoundly. They were not universal and didn’t think of trying.

Prof. Anna Bosman of Radboud University,
Nijmegen spoke on sensitivity, a perfectly normal condition, even a component of
spriirituality, that professionals have long misdiagnosed as a symptom of a
disease. Included in the definition of spiritual crisis is that it “reveals
itself by extraordinary experiences”. The speaker said: “I found it absurd till
this morning, when my colleague [David Lukoff] told of his LSD experience. Hey,
I have one of those, I thought. I had space cake and an out-of-the-body
experience.”

Sensitivity has as its original meaning: to find
your way. In a source of 1400, it meant “interpretation”, in 1526 the “external
sense organs”, in 1816 an “extreme physical experience”. Only in 1900 did it
start to mean what we understand as sensitivity.

She also protested against the tendency of
professionals to treak people as statistical averages. Thus, they say: ”Autistic
people have a lower memory”, and proceed to expect that of every single
autistic patient. We treat people like that, projecting statistical data on
averages onto individuals.

Afterwards, I heard several
other therapists complain that this is what is being said for the last several
decades. Nothing new, they said. It reminded me of the presence of too many
therapists working on people’s normalcy and too few yogis working towards
enlightenment.

Pim van Lommel spoke about “non-local
consciousness”. He wrote a book about the near-death experience (NDE) and its
life-changing effects. Is it possible to speak of a beginning of our
consciousness and will it ever end?

He said: we were happy in 1967 for
resuscitating a patient, it was new then; but he seemed disappointed at coming
back to life, so good had his NDE been. NDE raised a number of questions. How
does the content of an NDE come about? Why does it change life so radically?

And first of all: what is an NDE? For most
physicians it is incomprehensible.
During cardiac arrest, anoxia (lack of oxygen) in the brain sets in and the
patient must be resuscitated within 5 minutes. During this time, some report
having had an NDE. We investigated this with a control group who did not report
an NDE. We found no effect from duration of cardiac arrest, of unconsciousness,
the administering of drugs, gender, religion, degree of education.. The effect
of an NDE was no more fear of death, compassion, acceptance, increased
appreciation of life, enhanced intuitive sensibility. But an NDE is also
traumatic, both at the inter- and intrapersonal level: integration of the
experience, loneliness, homesickness, nostalgia after forced return to the body,
and fear of rejection.

Only 18% of anoxia or cardiac arrest patients
reported an NDE. Psychological, pharmacological, physiological explanations all
fail. There have been four investigation, all had a similar result: 11% to 23%
have an NDE. Patients also report similar sensations during an NDE. Thus, many
report a holographic life review: thet had remembered every action, even every
thought. They also report Importance of love, causation, etc. Many also saw
their future life, e.g. someone saw his wife’s future death.

There are just too many proofs of the reality
of NDE and no sussessful skeptical explanations. So, it seems functions like a TV
or mobile phone: it receives and transmits information, but does not produce
it.

Prof.
Pim van Lommel concluded by showing us two quotations. UN general
secretaryand Nobel peace prize winner
Dag Hammerskjöld said: “Our ideas about death define how we live our life.” And
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said in Faust 2 to a skeptic:

“I see the
learned man in what you say!

What you
don’t touch, for you lies miles away;

What you
don’t grasp, is wholly lost to you;

What you
don’t reckon, you believe not true;

What you
don’t weigh, that has for you no weight;

What you
don’t count, you’re sure is counterfeit.”

So, between the extremes of
believing anything and disbelieving anything (skepticism), there is an attitude
of investigating the mysterious and sometimes upholding it when it proves to be
consistent and surviving any attempts to explain it away.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Michiel
Hegener is a Dutch journalist who has kept his personal memories of
reincarnation to himself for many years. He immediately sensed , and is now in
a position to confirm from his own and his interviewees’ experience, that
openly expressing a belief in reincarnation can damage one’s career. His book Leven op herhaling (in Dutch: “Living in
repeat mode”) started as a journalistic search into the truth of reincarnation
which the leading Rotterdam daily NRC refused to publish.

The writer
looks at the existing proof for reincarnation. This proof is mainly the
spontaneous testimony of children, the testimony of adults brought into trance
by regression therapists, and the procedures of the Tibetan Tulkus and others
who consciously deal with reincarnation. He does not hesitate to map out their
weak points, but concludes nonetheless that what remains is still very
persuasive: memories from past lives are a fact, and reincarnation is this
fact’s most credible explanation.

Proof

Persuasive
proof is for instance provided by the case of James Feininger, an American child
of Christian parents who at first set out to disprove his reincarnation
“fantasies”. He reported many facts, which were all verified, about the life of
fighter pilot James Huston, shot down by the Japanese in World War 2. His
parents Bruce and Andrea Feininger devoted the book Soul Survivor to the long and tortuous process of verification and
their conversion to reincarnation belief. Many cases of children reporting past
lives have been studied by Ian Stevenson and his successor Jim Tucker, and by
the Indian woman researcher Satwant Pasricha. Adult cases of regression have
been tested and largely or fully verified by the Australian researcher Peter
Ramster, such as the case of the Australian housewife Gwen McDonald who reports
having lived in 18th-century Britain, by the Icelandic researcher
Elendur Haraldsson, and a few others. US police inspector Robert Snow
documented how he discovered and fully verified how he lived in the 19th
century as the painter Carroll Beckwith.

No two
people remember the same life, which would have been an argument against
reincarnation and for a lesser paranormal explanation such as telepathy. Two
large samples of adults both show an almost equal division of past lives as man
or as woman, which is an argument for their testimonies’ veracity.

Skeptics

The writer
also cites some Tulkus (consciously reincarnating Lamas) such as Gyalwang Karmapa, Dutch regression therapist
Lowie de Bie, and researcher Titus Rivas. Finally, he crosses swords with the
skeptics Steve Hales (student of reincarnation researcher Robert Almeder) and
Rob Nanninga.

In
particular, he reports rather negatively on an article on reincarnation research
by the leading Dutch skeptic Rob Nanninga. Skeptics have this knee-jerk
reaction of alleging fraud. They are paranoids living in a world full of
deceivers eager for money. Indeed, they are very money-oriented. They will say,
for instance, about natural diets that “they don’t make you lighter, except
your wallet”. From my experience in the New Age world, I have found there are
far more deluded people than outright frauds, who don’t believe what they say
but make others believe it. At any rate, the allegation of fraud is a serious
affair, and should only be made if you can provide positive proof, not as an
automatic alternative when a real explanation of unexplained facts is lacking.

But the
good side of the hostile attitude of the skeptics and of the Western
establishment is that nothing but the best evidence is good enough. The sloppy
evidence common among internet Hindus, who claim to have “proven” reincarnation
where it turns out that from their armchairs they have only argued that it is
more rational and just than Christianity’s eternal afterlife (which plays upon
the fond expectation that the world is just after all), will not do. Here, the
anomalies are so strong that a explanation other than reincarnation becomes
very unlikely. The interpretation of a karmic connection between lives, already
disputed and practically undiscussed in this book, is much harder to prove, and
is at any rate very different from the mere fact that we reincarnate. The
Hindu-Buddhist belief in karmic reincarnation is now perhaps the best-known
version of the reincarnation theory in the West, but is by no means universal.
Some peoples believe that reincarnation is desirable, not something that must
be ended (as Buddhists believe), or that it is simply a fact of life.

One thing
that strikes me, as an Orientalist and decennia-long student of Hindu-Buddhist
traditions involving reincarnation, is that this book, like every regression
therapist or reincarnation researcher that I have heard lecture or with whom I
have talked, treats reincarnation without encountering any fact that points to
karma. There seems to be a continuity between lives, e.g. birthmarks are at the
spot where the earlier incarnation suffered wounds, and an obvious tendency is
reported to be reborn in roughly the same neighbourhood, family or
circumstances. But there seems to be no evidence of reward or punishment, of
being born blind as a punishment for past sins.

There is
only little reference to existing ethnic beliefs about reincarnation. The
Tibetan Tulkus are merely cited for their practice of “recognizing” new
incarnations, not for their doctrines. Even the selection of interesting cases
strongly discriminates against people from nations that already have a widespread
belief in reincarnation. This is done on purpose: the numerous cases reported
in India would be shot down by skeptics as cases of encouragement by the
environment, which applauds recognized cases of reincarnations as prestigious
or at least as welcome. In the West, and especially in atheist, Muslim and
militantly Christian circles, claims of reincarnation are resolutely
disbelieved, so cases are reported which were actually discovered by people who
were at first out to disprove reincarnation.

Implications

Among the
implications of reincarnation are a far greater attention to children’s rights.
We are our children or grandchildren. Thus, children should not be given
lifelong bodily interventions such as circumcision. They should not be forced
into a religion. Of course, if reincarnation is recognized as a fact, it will
be very harmful for the religions that deny it. So, this research has an
inherent bias against Christianity and Islam, unless it concludes negatively.

Meanwhile,
the belief in reincarnation should also stimulate interreligious tolerance.
Those against whom we now fight on the streets (or otherwise hate), might be a
community to which we once belonged ourselves. In India, 19 cases of
reincarnation in a sample of 387 turned out to have changed religion between
lives. But again, such a scenario is anything but religiously neutral: it
confirms a widespread (though not a defining) Hindu belief and refutes the
official Muslim position.

Another
implication is ecology. We must leave the earth in good condition to future
generations, because we ourselves are the future generations. A related issue
is animal welfare, to whom Hindus and Jains pay so much attention:. That cow
you see on the streets, or in the meadow, may (at least according to some
reincarnation researchers) be the temporary abode of a soul normally incarnated
in humans.

The writer
is inclined to the oft-heard position that we shall never fully know, but that
is to be doubted. Isaac Newton formulated the law of gravity, which became just
another line in textbooks, then died in 1727. Two centuries later, people were
applying his finding by flying in airplanes. Later, they set foot on the moon,
and now satellites form an important and irreplaceable part of our
telecommunications. If reincarnation proves to be true, our gaining of knowledge
will be accelerated by more generous funding (the main problem so far) and a
larger focus on this line of research. Even without those, we will soon
investigate such questions as: what is the relationship between successive
lives (maybe there is karma after all)? Is reincarnation in non-human life
forms possible? What is the beginning of this cycle and how does it end? Know
the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Prof.
Vijaya Rajiva thinks that I as an outsider cannot really help the Hindus. So
far, so good: if Hindus don’t help themselves, there is indeed no outsider who
can save them. However, she also says (indeed it is her chief message) that
Hindus don’t need outsiders because the traditional Hindu way is good enough.
But is it?

A diagnosis of the Hindu situation

Yes, the
traditional Hindu way has some remarkable achievements to its credit, no one
should deny that. The very existence of a Hindu civilization after more than a
thousand years of Islamic battering and a few centuries of European
colonization is indeed not so evident. Hindus have fought, and there was
something invincible in the Hindu social structure.

However,
the losses were also staggering. A part of the Hindu biomass, i.e. Hindu
people, went over to the Islamic enemy. They secured an Islamic territory in
1947 as well as legal, constitutional and de facto privileges in the Indian
republic. Christianity tried several strategies to win converts, at first
rather unsuccessfully, but now with increasing results. At last, the climate is
right, with a defenceless Hindu society offering little resistance against the
conversion wave.

Meanwhile, the
world has changed. As I have argued in my article about missionary anti-racism,
the Christian Churches and the missionary apparatus have adapted admirably,
crossing the floor all the way from association with colonial racism to a Dalit-Dravidianist
discourse which borrows fromanti-racism. They have many successes to show for
it. Though the Indian Churches have cooperated with the governmental goal of
reproductive self-restriction, they have still made demographic gains, with the
reality being far more impressive than the official figures, which are already
impressive enough. Indian Islam too, for all its looking back to a medieval
Prophet, has adapted sufficiently to make and consolidate its gains. After winning
a separate territory in 1947, it gained a promising foothold in the Indian
Republic, secured a partisan anti-Hindu section of the Hindus (“secularism”), made
the media and academe toe an anti-Hindu line, and gained enormously in numbers
both through a consistently high birthrate and through immigration.

Hinduism,
by contrast, is losing constantly. It is fragmented along caste and ethnic lines
(worsened by the “secularist” regime) but also along ideological lines, chiefly
secular against Hindu activist.It is
divided against itself. There is a Hindu nationalist movement, but it is warped
by the “Western” nationalist viewpoint and deliberately unable to wage the
ideological struggle against Hindu society’s non-Hindu besiegers. Its recent
help to the people from the Northeast is commendable, but proves also how
formidable the problems inside India have become. Traditional Hinduism is
losing its grip even among nominal Hindus, who learn the government version of
culture and history in their schools and watch TV-programmes on stations owned
by foreign or Indian (but either way anti-Hindu) magnates. That is why the
Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel concluded his diagnosis with the observation that
the death of Hinduism is no longer unthinkable.

There is
very little sign of Hindu forces adapting themselves to the new realities. A
few individuals show a remarkable sense of initiative, like Swami Dayananda
Saraswati (who patronized the Jerusalem declaration), Subramaniam Swamy (the
convert to Hindu nationalism), Prof. Yashwant Pathak (convenor of the Elders’
conferences) orSwami Vigyananda (VHP
general secretary); but over-all, this seems too little. The main
representative of the Hindus in politics, the BJP, has completely abandoned its
Hindu agenda, showing not just the weakness of character of people in the party
concerned, but the weakness of the Hindu spirit to which they respond. The
Hindu masses haven’t got a clue, though they react healthily whenever they have
to deal with hostile subversion or violence. They long for leaders, but most
leaders disappoint them. Hindus are mostly stuck in the past, and I interpret
Vijaya Rajiva’s article as a defence of this tendency to live in the past.

The good
thing about being an outsider is that, while one may not see what goes on
inside the black box of Hindu society, one can see the input and output all the
better. From the outside, it seems that Hindus are not dead yet, but are losing
ground all the time. So, from my vantage point, I can see very clearly that
there is no reason for the smugness emanating from Vijaya Rajiva’s article. One
can argue about the methods proposed by “alarmists” like N.S. Rajaram or Ashok
Chowgule, but their diagnosis that threats to India and to Hindu society are
looming large, is only realistic. One does not have to be a foreigner to see
what those Indians see, but suffice it to say that in our own way, we can see
it too.

Apaurusheya

The
Professor thinks that I am not in a position to say that the Vedas are apaurusheya, “impersonal”, often
interpreted as “supernatural”, “of divine origin”, because there I would not be
talking about my own heartfelt tradition. Well, exactly. That is indeed a point
on which I have waged many discussions with internet Hindus. Let me reword my
considered opinion a bit differently. I am in a position to say: no, the Vedas
are not divinely revealed. This is not the viewpoint of “Western” or
“Orientalist” scholarship, it is the Vedas themselves that say so: they are
composed by human seers who address the gods.

The Vedic
hymns naturally contain in passing many data about the age and region in which
they were composed, as well as the genealogy and the circumstances of their
composers. The gods figure in them in the second or the third person, the seers
in the first. Bhargo devasya dhimahi,
“let us meditate on the god’s effulgence”, or Tryambakan yajamahe, “Let us worship the three-eyed one”, or Agnim ile, “I praise the fire”, all have
the human seers as their subject, the gods as their object. This is in sharp
contrast with the Quran or the 10 commandments, which are deemed to be revealed
by God through his conduit, the prophet.

What Vijaya
Rajiva represents, is the Hindu tradition, which over the millennia has come to
differ considerably from the Vedic inspiration. Hindu tradition has turned the
Vedas from a human composition into a divine revelation, the seers and poets
into prophets. In fact, it has turned the Vedas into a kind of Quran. It is
unclear whether this is cause or consequence, but the Hindu mentality seems to
have evolved since the Vedic period. Whereas an unencumbered outsider sees the
greatness of the Vedic poets as creators, Hindu tradition reduces them to
conduits of the gods. Or worse even, to conduits of the single monotheist God,
who created the timeless Vedas along with the world. If that’s what the Vedas said,
we wouldn’t have bothered to give up the Bible, for it says much the same
thing.

Post-Vedic Hinduism

In
particular, the introduction of the notion of “liberation” or “enlightenment”
(absent in the Vedas) created an absolute, a steep inequality between people
deemed enlightened and the rest of us. Hence the veneration of gurus, see e.g.
the “Vedic” (but in fact Puranic, medieval) mantra in which the guru is equaled
to Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshvara. Rama never venerated his guru Vasishtha as a
quasi-god.

Another
novelty is the belief in reincarnation. It is not in the Vedas, no matter how
internet Hindus look for it there. The Upanishadic Brahmins Uddalaka and
Shvetaketu came to know about it from a Kshatriya (not coincidentally the caste
to which the later Buddha and Mahavira belonged), and explicitly acknowledged
it as a novelty, not implicated in the central Upanishadic doctrine of the Self
or in the liberation from the false identification of the Self with the
non-Self. In recent centuries and today, most Hindus are crypto-Buddhists to
whom reincarnation is a central belief and liberation is even defined as the
escape through meditation from the cycle of rebirths. That is not the original
Upanishadic view. I have seen many internet Hindus get angry for my making
these factual observations, but hey, that’s what scripture itself says. It just
goes to show how tradition may differ from real history as laid down in the
Vedas.

This is not
to say that reincarnation is untrue. Post-Christian Westerners with their
matter-of-fact approach have investigated testimonies of reincarnation
(spontaneous testimonies by children, provoked testimonies by adults in
regression trance, and Tibetan tulkus) and are inclined to conclude in favour
of reincarnation. Incidentally, they found no proof of the concomitant
Hindu-Buddhist doctrine of karma in the sense of reward or punishment for deeds
from a past life, a doctrine unknown to other reincarnation believers. But
reincarnation may be a fact, and those much-maligned Westerners would not say:
“I believe in reincarnation because Lord Buddha or the Shastras tell me so”,
but: “I believe in reincarnation because research findings confirm this hypothesis”.

This is
also not to deny that the belief in reincarnation is old. It certainly existed
in Vedic times, indeed it existed before the Amerindians left Northeast-Asia
for America, so that they could take it with them. But those who composed the
Vedas did not hold this belief, in fact they had a ritual for the dead in which
they pointed to a specific part of the heavens where the deceased went. In the
European world, the belief in an afterlife (Valhalla) coexisted with the belief
in reincarnation (taught by the Druids, or in Virgil’s Aeneis). Others, who
contributed to the non-Vedic part of Hinduism, may have held this belief, and
later it was accepted by the successors of the Vedic seers. Hinduism is a
confluence of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions, just as the Paurava Vedic tribe
coexisted with other tribes, and just as the Vedic Sanskrit language coexisted
with other Indo-Aryan, other Indo-European and totally other languages.

Another
example of how Westerners may see what Hindus don’t, was given to me by a
reviewer of my 1997 book BJP vis-à-vis
Hindu Resurgence. Like Vijaya Rajiva, he hoped to be delivered from those
non-Hindu busybodies trying to defend Hinduism. Apart from myself, he also
directed his ire against David Frawley, namely for writing in his autobiography
that he was a self-taught Sanskritist who had read the Vedas all by himself. In
the reviewer’s opinion, Frawley should have been initiated into the Vedas by a
recognized Vedacharya. Well, then he would have studied the Vedas through the
eyes of Hindu tradition, which captures and transforms the message of the Vedic
seers, whereas now, he accepted the face-to-face encounter with the Vedic seers
themselves. It has not kept him from becoming far more Hindu than myself, but I
note that to some Hindus, he has remained an outsider nonetheless.

So, a
Westerner, or indeed a globalist, may miss certain things, but conversely, they
see things which Hindu nationalists fail to see. That is why I am not
apologizing for being an outsider.

Hindu survival

However, I
have no quarrel with Hindu tradition. For me, everyone is free to practice
religion as he likes (within the usual confines of morality). There may be
something to living Hinduism which I cannot feel, and what I do see and feel is
already glorious enough. So, by all means, go ahead with it. Only, I am curious
to know what those traditional methods of survival are. Among them is certainly
the continuation of Hinduism as a living religion. In that sense, I have no
quarrel with Hindus forgetting about politics and taking part in religious
activities such as rituals and festivals.

It’s just
that I think this is not enough to survive. Many people have practiced their
religion but turned out to be no match for the “asuric forces”. So, on top of
continuing Hindu tradition, I’d like to see what strategies are being deployed
to outwit these asuric forces. Don’t tell the details to an outsider like me,
but then at least show me the results. Show me how the Hindu percentage in
India is increasing again. Show me your victories.

Swami and writer Ishwar Sharan, whom I know from
contributing to his book on Saint Thomas, has republished on the Bharata
Bharati website a text I wrote in 2007, on how the Churches have repositioned
themselves vis-à-vis racism, and how, in contrast, Hindus choose to live in the
past and keep on using the language appropriate for the colonial age. Shrill
tirades against “white Christian nations” will not do to counter the missionary
effort in India, now mostly carried out by natives. Christianity has changed
races several times in its history and its association with white racism was
only a phase, long gone now and kept alive only in some Hindus’ fevered
imagination. Even the odd expressions of white racism, like the recent attack
on Sikhs in the US probably was, are typically condemned by the Churches.

In reaction, Mrs. Radha Rajan has written on 28
August 2012: “Swamiji, why this renewed attack against Hindu intellectuals now?
And permit me to be blunt, none of this will deter me from always
looking out for Sonia Gandhi even in our religious domain.”

Well, go ahead and criticize the Italian bar-maid
who became the de facto “empress of India”. I don’t think she is all that
important, but I agree that the Churches can put pressure on Christian
politicians to facilitate their operations. I don’t think any country should
have a foreigner as its most powerful politician, but native Christian
politicians are more dangerous to Hinduism, and a few have more conversions to
their credit.

But more serious is that my article gets perceived
as an “attack against Indian intellectuals”. Well, to the extent that Indian
intellectuals identify the Churches with “foreign” and “white”, I think indeed
that they are anachronistic and wrong. That is just my dissenting opinion,
which I don’t conceive of as an “attack”. I find differences of opinion quite
normal, the very stuff of intellectual life, and those who can only see them as
attacks are not intellectuals.

Hindu racism?

Radha Rajan says: “I don’t want to be told how
to fight my battles and what weapons to use.” My knowledge of ground
realities in India is very limited, but through my journeys, through the
writings of Hindu activists and now through the internet, I get the impression
of Hindus suffering defeat upon defeat. There are some signs of light, some
local Hindu gains, but over all, the evolution is not good. Just look at the
demographic gains of Christianity and Islam, and the confused and weak stand of
the Hindu’s main political representative, the BJP. So the weapons being used
do not seem to be very effective. I think they could use a reality check, hence
my article.

Radha Rajan also wrote: “Now this is once again
white intellectual elite attempting to define the parameters and idiom of
racism. Racism is as much about race as it is about politics as done by the
white race. The white race, as a political category is despised by its
victims for the political instruments it devised and used to subjugate non
christians and non whites.”

The age in which the white race dominated the world
lasted only a few centuries. Indeed, Hindus never tire of telling us that in
the premodern age, most world trade was in the hands of the Asian powers India
and China, so Western dominance was only a brief intermezzo. It is quite
unhistorical to base essentialist pronouncements on such a short episode. Don’t
Hindus think in ages, Westerners only in centuries?

But I agree that here, Radha Rajan represents a
very large Hindu opinion. That section of Hindus claims to engage with
Christian missionaries but is in fact fixated on “whites”, a vanishing minority
among them. But it is so much easier if you can recognize the enemy by his skin
colour instead of by a complicated thing such as his religious ideology. And
Hindus, just like most people, like to take the easy option. Moreover, this
reduction of complex ideological issues to race is highly secular, so there is
a premium in secular India on preferring the Christian or Muslim race-follow to
the differently-coloured ideological friend. That is why the fearful BJP will
prefer to say that, for instance, Bangladeshi intrusion on Bodo lands is not a
religious but a foreigners’ problem, even while Mumbai Muslims express their
solidarity not with their Bodo fellow-countrymen but with their foreign fellow-Muslims.

According to Radha Rajan: “To now say that this
dislike and expression of dislike of the white race is also racism is to say
a rape victim's natural revulsion of the male species is sexism. The white
race either wants to be ring master with the rest of the world
playing circus animals or it wants us to look up at it helplessly while it
assumes a paternalist role.”

It is not clear whether she (and some other Hindus
who have reacted) differentiates between my view and my description of the
Churches’ view, but since we’re all deemed white, I guess it’s all the same.
This undisguised expression of anti-white racism may earn her some popularity
but is misconceived.

I will not bother with the moral issues in her
explicit defence of racism. Maybe she can show its successes, and they would
justify it, who knows? What I want to explain, is that this is not about
“natural revulsion” against the white race, but just the reverse. As US-based
Communist Vijay Prashad once explained, Hindus in the US pretended to be white
when being white was fashionable (basing their own claim of whiteness on the
Aryan Invasion Theory) but changed over to a non-white identity when being
non-white became more gainful. So, in this construction of things, which
Chennai-based Mrs. Radha Rajan must know through the similar discourse of the Dravidianist
parties, she is a lot whiter than she pretends.

Caste discrimination is presented by the Churches
and their Dalit wardens as precisely a case of white racism against natives,
viz. by the Aryan invaders who became the upper castes (including Radha Rajan’s
own Aiyangar Brahmins)against the
aboriginals, who were turned into the lower castes. This is not about the British
colonizers resenting the Indians’ anticolonialism and therefore criticizing
anti-white racism, but about the anticolonialism of the lower castes resenting
the earlier colonization by the Aryan invaders, the ancestors of Radha Rajan. To
the British back then, and to the Dalit and Dravidianist spokesmen now,
upper-caste imperialism is of the same kind (essentially foreign, though far
more thorough) as British imperialism. Whether there was an Aryan invasion may
be disputed, but I merely observe that the Churches are successfully building
on that scenario.

The art of making enemies

This is also an occasion for me to express my
amazement at Hindus’ propensity to see and make enemies everywhere, even among
Hindus. In the Panchatantra, where a
teacher has to instruct some princes through fables in the art of statecraft,
one of the five books is devoted to the art of making friends. But today’s
Hindus seem better at the art of turning friends into enemies.

Radha Rajan and other Vijayvaani authors have
earlier attacked the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha for its 2008 “Jerusalem
Declaration”, a remarkable diplomatic victory for the Hindus. The underlying
theology may have been unsophisticated, if only because the event was rather
improvised, and criticism is allowed, but hey, Jews have common interests with
Hindus (the defence against Muslim terrorism and against Christian missionary
subversion being most acute), so this building of bridges deserved some
applause.

They have also criticized and antagonized the NRIs
in general, Rajiv Malhotra in particular. US-based ex-businessman Mr. Malhotra
has built an enormous database of highly relevant information, and developed
pro-Hindu and pro-India arguments in his books. While fighting Christianity, he
is attacked in the back by envious Hindus. If it can be any consolation,
Malhotra is no better than Radha Rajan when it comes to making friends. I have
witnessed how he antagonized many Hindus through his sharp and unforgiving (but
truthful) language, even some people who were allies only a year ago. At any
rate, at a time when the situation of Hindus in India and Hindus abroad is ever
more similar, wisdom dictates that these two categories refrain from
antagonizing each other.

And now, Radha Rajan also wants to antagonize
Hinduism’s Western allies. When I first came to India, the Ayodhya movement was
gathering strength, and what I, as coming from the country where most EU
institutions are housed, got to hear all the time from Hindu activists, was the
theme of a “Western-Indian alliance against Islam”. Back then, Hindus were
vaguely aware of a similarity between the West and India. Thus, colonialism
started as a way of by-passing the Muslims, who threatened Europe for a thousand
years and conquered parts of it. As late as the early 19th century,
Europeans and even American seafarers were victims of enslavement by Muslims,
just like the Hindus. (Of course Europe and the Islamic world also cooperated,
though problematically: the European slave-trade, of which the abolition’s 200th
anniversary occasioned my article, started as a Portuguese subcontractor’s
operation in a far larger and centuries-old Muslim slave-trade.) Today,
European worries about Islamic encroachment remind one of what India is going
through. So, among other things, we have that in common.

But now, Christianity is seen as more of a threat
than Islam, and it gets identified with the West. Indeed, Westerners who have
explicitly broken with Christianity are routinely dismissed by Hindu internet
warriors as “Christians”. At the same time, recent interventions by America
and/or NATO, made possible by their victory in the Cold War, have made the West
seem very unsympathetic. Attacks on India’s old NAM ally Yugoslavia, on
Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (with the French and British leaders shaking hands
there and looking very neo-colonial) are not liked by a people that remembers
foreign invasions too well, albeit that these came from its Chinese and
Pakistani neighbours. These Western interventions were criminal and mistaken,
but it’s not to me that our governments will listen. At any rate, this
development doesn’t change the earlier anti-Islamic equation, but it has
changed the Hindus’ focus.

So, some Hindus invent reasons to treat “whites” as
the enemy: the Partition of India back then and the persecution of Hindus in
Bangladesh today is blamed on the British (The
Empire’s Last Casualty is the secular-sounding title of a recent Hindu book
on Bangladeshi persecution of its minorities), not on its real Islamic perpetrators;
the Pakistani and otherwise Islamic terror attacks on India are blamed by
Vijayvaani on covert American influence. It seems that some Hindus are white
supremacists: for something meaningful to happen they always have to find a
white hand behind it.

Well, suit yourselves. I only tried to sharpen the
Hindu perception of how the Churches function today, and therefore to correct
some misperceptions. But I would never want to tell Hindus how best to face
their self-declared enemies. If you prefer to live in the colonial past or in a
delusional world of your own creation, do your worst. If your weapons are more
effective than mine, show me the successes you achieve with them.

Only, I hear laughter in the background. It must be
by brown Christians who go on converting Hindus all while Hindu activists have
their gaze fixed on “white racist Christian missionaries”.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.